Great Financial Times Article Today

A colleague of mine slipped a great Financial Times article under my door today. It talked about how 10K’s are so over bogged down with information that everyday investors are not sure what to take from these huge reports nor do they have the time to sift through all the accounting jargon contained in the reports.  It has a great quote about how to analyze a company. “Cash is fact and everything else is opinion”. Which is certainly true when analyzing a company that’s growing at the same rate as the market (in my opinion this is anything in the 10% per year or less range and you can take that 10% to be revenues or net income, whichever you like).  I am a firm believer in that the cash flow statement will tell you loud and clear if you have a viable sustainable entity on your hand or just a fad. However, fads are the place to catch the big market moves and if you desire to roll the dice and earn an above average annual return, you have to be willing to take on companies that have not have such great cash flow. But back to the point of all this. I think you can get just as much good information on a company from an analysts reports and Google Finance as you can from reading a dull confusing annual report and I tend to find my trendiest investments at IBD.